European political history

Representative monarchy

IN 1689 the French monarchy was the most powerful in Europe. Its dominance was as much cultural as military. In architecture and in the use of the French language, German courts paid it the compliment of imitation. One hundred years later, Louis XVI was forced to leave Versailles for the capital by an angry Paris mob. Yet other absolutist royal families, notably the Habsburgs, would survive until the wreck of old Europe in 1918. The present book offers to explain the cultural reasons why.

T.C.W. Blanning, a professor of history at Cambridge University, makes use of Juergen Habermas's terms “representational culture” and “the public sphere”—though this is certainly not a work of uncritical discipleship. By representational culture is meant one in which the sovereign, who embodies the nation, exercises and displays—“re-presents”—his power before his subjects. Of such cultures, Louis XIV's France is the last great example.Although he did not say “L'état, c'est moi”, as Mr Blanning remarks, he might have done. Louis did not regard his kingdom as his property, and saw himself as a steward ruling under God and according to natural and customary law; but he believed that his gloire and that of the state were identical. As “patron of all the arts” (Dryden's admiring phrase), Louis subsumed the achievement of such varied geniuses as Molière and Racine to his own prestige. To an extent never seen in England, the court was the centre of taste as well as power.

Representational culture of this kind persisted into the 18th century, but a public sphere developed alongside it. With an expanding and increasingly literate population throughout Europe, the arts became commercialised, the author and the composer selling their productions through the publisher and the impresario. New forums for communication and debate—the newspaper, the circulating library, even the coffee-house—sprang up. Mr Blanning insists that the emerging public sphere was still partly aristocratic; but most importantly a public was now articulating its own cultural and political choices.

It was in its inability to adapt to changed conditions and to recognise the phenomenon of public opinion, Mr Blanning argues, that the French monarchy failed. Versailles and its increasingly ossified court rituals no longer testified to the greatness of the king but rather to his isolation from the nation. Royal building programmes and pageantry came to seem wasteful extravagance. The licentiousness of Louis XV, followed by the widely rumoured, though almost certainly fictitious, bisexual promiscuity of Marie Antoinette, brought the throne into disrepute.

Worse, the queen represented the shift to a pro-Austrian foreign policy which was widely perceived as having brought France only military and diplomatic humiliation. Thus the legitimacy of the Bourbon monarchy seeped away. Elsewhere, more decisive absolute monarchs, Frederick II and Joseph II, responded to the emergent cultural nationalism of their subjects by redefining their role as servants of the state. Within England's mixed constitution, George III—like Joseph frugal, hardworking and relatively informal—weathered the political crises of the first half of his reign to become the initiator of popular domestic monarchy.

Mr Blanning's emphasis falls on Louis XVI's failures and missed opportunities. One might object that he does insufficient justice to the reforming efforts of the king's ministers, and that there is still a case for de Tocqueville's thesis that ancien régime France destabilised because it too, like Austria, was trying to reform itself. Yet the fact that, unlike Austria, it failed to do so confirms what emerges strongly from this wide-ranging and accessible book: the extent to which successful absolutism depended upon the intelligence, energy and charisma of the monarch himself.